Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen (6 page)

Nonetheless it is undeniable that the king was angered by his wife’s affection for prince Raymond. The explanation seems to lie in a disagreement over the purpose of the French crusade. Raymond wanted to use such a reinforcement to attack the most dangerous Saracen strongholds, in particular Aleppo; he even hoped to reconquer and restore the lost county of Edessa. He had too few troops of his own and without help there was a possibility that he might be overrun by the Saracens; and if Antioch fell, all Outremer would be in danger. But Louis decided to go on to Jerusalem, and clung to his resolve with all the obstinacy of a weak young man. Perhaps he resented the excessive self-assurance of his elegant and possibly patronizing host, and he may have nursed suspicions of Raymond’s relations with the Greeks, whom Louis had now grown to hate.

Eleanor was outraged by her husband’s stupidity. In front of everyone she spoke long and passionately in favour of her uncle’s plan. Infuriated by what must have seemed open contempt for him, the king announced that he was leaving Antioch without further delay and that as a dutiful wife she had to accompany him. The queen, by now equally angry, answered that he might go but she would stay in Antioch, and that furthermore she wanted their marriage annulled on grounds of consanguinity (i.e. that they were within the degree of kinship that made a marriage canonically illegal). One unreliable chronicler claims that she told Louis he wasn’t ‘worth a bad pear’.

The king’s paymaster, a Templar named Thierry Galeran, was a eunuch of whom Eleanor had made an enemy by mocking at his disability. No doubt with relish, Thierry advised Louis to use force. Accordingly in the middle of the next night, royal troops broke into the queen’s palace and dragged her off to the St Paul gate, where her husband was waiting. They left Antioch secretly, before dawn.

Louis wrote to Suger complaining about Eleanor, but the wise abbot replied: ‘With regard to the queen your wife, I think you should conceal any displeasure until you are back in your own kingdom, when you will be able to consider the matter more calmly.’ The king seems to have taken this advice, but the rift between the couple never really mended.

Flaws in Louis VII’s character, brought out by the strains of the crusade, may be discerned in his attitude towards the Greeks. He hated them because of their failure to help him in Anatolia, most unjustly blaming his misfortunes on the emperor Manuel. One may even guess at an element of paranoia.

After the French king and queen had at last reached Jerusalem — where Louis was welcomed ‘as an angel of the Lord’ — and fulfilled their vow to pray at the Holy Sepulchre, they went on to Acre, which was the second city and chief port of the little kingdom. Here they found an imposing assembly that included the young king Baldwin III of Jerusalem and his Palestinian barons together with the emperor Conrad and many German lords. Louis allowed himself to be talked into joining a great and misguided expedition against the hitherto friendly Saracen city of Damascus. It ended in disaster, the Latin army having to beat a humiliating retreat and suffering many casualties. Despite letters from Suger that implored him to come home, however, Louis insisted on staying in the kingdom of Jerusalem for another year. Whatever the quarrel between them, Eleanor can hardly have been averse to such agreeable surroundings. And she had the acid consolation of knowing that if only her husband had taken her advice and co-operated with Raymond of Antioch, Outremer would now have been rejoicing instead of lamenting the
débâcle
at Damascus.

Some time after Easter 1149, Louis and Eleanor at last left the Holy Land, sailing from Acre in separate ships. There was war between Sicily and Byzantium and the queen’s vessel was captured by the Greek emperor’s ships off the Peloponnese coast. The king’s vessel escaped, and when, after an exhausting voyage that lasted several weeks, he landed on the shore of Calabria, he did not know whether his wife was still alive; he shows little emotion in a letter giving Suger the news. King Roger of Sicily was happy to inform him that his navy had recaptured Eleanor’s ship and that she had been recuperating at Palermo, where she insisted on staying for at least a fortnight longer.

Anyone so intelligent as Eleanor would have been intrigued by the extraordinary Sicilian court. Its Norman king dressed in robes of Byzantine purple embroidered with kufic lettering and weird animals in gold, worshipped according to the Latin rite in Greek churches, and kept his wife in a harem. His army contained Frankish knights and Saracen infantry, and his government was administered by Norman chamberlains, Byzantine
catapans
and Arab
cadis.
The luxury rivalled that of Constantinople and Antioch. She must have been most reluctant to rejoin her husband on the Italian mainland.

As for Raymond of Antioch, his niece never saw him again. About the time that she was setting sail from Acre, in June 1149, he fell in battle against the Saracens. His skull was set in silver and sent to the caliph of Baghdad.

4 The Divorce

‘Peut-être on t’a conté la fameuse disgrace De l’altière Vasthi ….’

Racine,
Esther

‘Let it be known among the laws of the Persians and the Medes, that it be not altered, that Vashti come no more before King Ahasuerus; and let the king give her royal estate to another that is better than she.’

The Book of Esther

The end of Louis and Eleanor’s marriage was plainly in sight. The king had been so affected by his experiences during the crusade that he spent even longer hours at prayer, and cropped his head and shaved his beard like a priest. Eleanor’s comment was ‘I married a monk, not a king’. He no longer slept with her, although, given the mediaeval Christian’s distrust of physical love, it is unlikely that he had ever spent much time in her bed. (This is probably the reason why she had borne only one child; later she presented a more virile husband with five sons and three daughters.) Meanwhile they continued their journey homeward by land, having had enough of sea voyages, and rode glumly northward through Italy.

The atmosphere must have been tense with misery. Louis was obsessed by the consanguinity that Eleanor had raised so furiously at Antioch. Even during the Champagne war St Bernard had asked why the king could take such exception to the consanguinity of Raoul of Vermandois and his wife when Louis and Eleanor were themselves related within the fourth, forbidden degree. Moreover, the pope had eventually accepted Raoul’s plea and recognized the annulment. As the king always had a most delicate conscience and was a martyr to scruples, he was tormented by guilt. His anguish was made worse by the fact that despite all their quarrels he was still passionately in love with Eleanor.

The unhappy pair reached Tusculum on 9 October 1149. Here the papal court was in residence, having fled from Rome (which was threatened by imperial troops in one of the perennial conflicts between pope and emperor). Eugenius III gave them a warm welcome, as we know from the history of John of Salisbury, then a papal secretary, who was present. Louis took the opportunity to confess his misgivings about the validity of his marriage. The pope told him to ignore them, to forget the very word consanguinity; if necessary, a dispensation could be provided by the Church. John noted that despite his scruples the king loved Eleanor with an almost childish love. He also observed that one of Louis’s confidants — presumably Thierry Galeran — was constantly trying to poison his mind against the queen. Eugenius tried hard to reconcile the couple. He forced them to sleep together, personally conducting them to a guest room furnished with splendid silk hangings but with only one bed. This austere pontiff — originally a Cistercian monk — was obviously moved by their predicament. When they left, Eugenius could not keep back his tears as he blessed both them and France.

Eleanor and Louis travelled on to Rome. Here they were taken on a tour of the Eternal City by cardinals whom Eugenius had sent with them for the purpose. They rode on over the Alps, through the Jura, and at last reached Paris in November 1149. They had been away for two years and six months. The regent Suger, who met them at Auxerre, handed back to his master a realm that was as peaceful as it was prosperous.

The royal marriage had not been healed by Eugenius. Suger, who still possessed more influence over Louis than anyone, did his best to save it. He considered the extension of Capetian rule throughout France to be the will of God and dreaded a divorce that would lose the monarchy Aquitaine. In the summer of 1150 Eleanor bore her second child — not an heir, but another daughter (Alice, who would one day be countess of Blois), whose birth did nothing to reconcile her parents. Then, in January 1151, abbot Suger died.

According to an English chronicler, after Louis and Eleanor returned to France they began to quarrel over everything. It was now that she took such offence at his habits and began to grumble again about being married to a monk. Unquestionably Louis was more devout then ever. He made yet another pilgrimage of expiation to Vitry-le-Brulé, planting Cypress trees that he had brought back from the Holy Land (whose descendents still grow there today). He continued to take advice from men who were enemies of the queen, including Thierry Galeran.

For the time being, however, the king was too busy with a feudal dispute to worry about his marriage. He found himself at war with one of the most formidable of French vassals — Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou. The quarrel was over Geoffrey’s treatment of Rigaud Berlai, the lord of Montreuil-Bellay near Saumur. Rigaud was the count’s most turbulent vassal, who constantly ravaged his lands. Unfortunately he was also Louis’s seneschal in Poitou. When the king left France on crusade the count began a siege of Montreuil-Bellay that was to last for three years. As soon as Louis returned, Rigaud appealed to him for help, but only when Geoffrey finally stormed and burned Montreuil-Bellay, shackling Rigaud like a common felon, did the king intervene. He beseiged Arques in Normandy — where the count’s son was duke — and sacked Séez. He was soon made to realize that he was facing dangerous and resourceful opponents. Bernard of Clairvaux stepped in and Geoffrey and Louis agreed to let him arbitrate. Accordingly the count and his son, Henry FitzEm-press, rode to Paris bringing the miserable Rigaud with them, still in chains.

They reached Paris in August 1151. Henry paid homage for his new duchy of Normandy and Louis received it, recognizing him as duke; but there was an unedifying wrangle over Rigaud. Bernard had had the count excommunicated for attacking Rigaud while the king was away on crusade and breaking ‘the truce of God’. He graciously offered to absolve Geoffrey if he would release Rigaud at once. To the saint’s angry astonishment the count refused, saying that he hoped God would not forgive him if imprisoning Rigaud had been a sin. Bernard prophesied an early and evil end for a man who could utter such blasphemy. Eventually Geoffrey became more reasonable and after his son had agreed to hand over most of the Vexin (on the Norman border) the two sides agreed on a peace settlement.

Eleanor seems to have been very impressed by these two visitors. Geoffrey was a fine-looking man (his other nickname besides Plantagenet was ‘the Handsome’) and territorially he was almost as powerful as Louis. He had married the lady Matilda, widow of the emperor Henry V and daughter and heiress of Henry I of England: her cousin Stephen of Blois had usurped the throne, but her supporters were many and there was a good chance that her son by Geoffrey would one day become king. Gerald of Wales claims that Geoffrey made adulterous advances to queen Eleanor; but most chroniclers agree with William of Newburgh that she was more attracted by Geoffrey’s son, Henry. In the stern words of her Victorian biographer, Miss Strickland, ‘Eleanor acted with her usual disgusting levity in the advances she made to this youth’. But William of Newburgh says simply that the queen desired a marriage with the young duke on the grounds of compatibility, which is quite possible. The fact that Henry was eleven years her junior is irrelevant: his father was eleven years younger than his mother Matilda. And by now Louis was growing more and more difficult; Eleanor must daily have anticipated the end of her marriage. Indeed, in the light of what followed, it is more than likely that she reached some sort of secret understanding with Henry.

Nevertheless it is almost certain that during the whole of her marriage she was faithful to Louis. Her reputation may well have suffered from speculation about so beautiful a woman — speculation superficially confirmed by her clothes and by her jokes.

The catalyst that ended her marriage was St Bernard. Sure enough, his curse struck Geoffrey down within a matter of days. The journey back to Anjou was a hot one and on the way the count went for a swim in a little stream that ran into the Loire; the same night he was stricken by a fever and three days later, on 7 September, he died. Everyone must have remembered the saint’s prophecy. Now that Suger was dead, Bernard’s influence on king Louis was irresistible.